I'm currently converting season 2 of Modern Family to VCD-compliant Mpeg-1, but once that's done, I'll dust off some of ye olde Andromeda or Birds of Prey scripts and see if changing the minimum quantizer from 1 to 2 has much of an effect.

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If I ask "How do I do X?" or "what happens if I do X?", and X is a very bad thing that no one would ever normally do, assume that I already know this, and that I have Katie reasons for asking anyway.

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If I ask "How do I do X?" or "what happens if I do X?", and X is a very bad thing that no one would ever normally do, assume that I already know this, and that I have Katie reasons for asking anyway.

Katie probably won't read this post, or pretend not to, because I think I'm one of the "other forum members" she refers to in her signature which means I'm on her ignore list so I can't learn from her reading my posts..... or however it works according to her signature...... but...
she probably should try what I did here and run a CQ2.0 single pass encode to see what the resulting bitrate will be, and whether it's in the same ballpark as the bitrate she's using for 2 pass encoding. Or she could at least run a compression test. I'd explain how to run one but I probably haven't got it wrong enough to learn how.... or however it works according to her signature..... but it's just guessing without any further details.

I played around a little more with the sample I'd been using for testing a couple of days ago, and this time Xvid wasn't overshooting the requested bitrate. After hunting through log files to see WTF, it turned out I somehow reset the overflow percentage. I don't remember doing that, but with it increased to 10% again today the target bitrate was almost exact.

It lied about using the sharper (mpeg) matrix, probably because I have the most strict hardware compatibility setting enabled, but the resulting bitrate was 1438kbps, however visually it wasn't that far off the encode I ran at 2050kbps in respect to detail retention. Maybe about 95%, but the bitrate was about 600kbps less.

AutoGK doesn't set the min quantizer to 1. Instead, when the quality is high, it actually does this (for lower quality it might reduce the min and max to 2 and 4 respectively etc.)....
Would the following really force the same quantizer for all frames (assuming B-Frames were still enabled)?

Old thread, but I thought I'd let you all know how I ultimately fixed the problem:

Remember when upping a few key variables from 5% to 10% helped a little bit, but not enough? Well, I tried cranking them up to around 50% to see what would happen... and that worked! Now I'm playing around with restricting the range of permitted quantizers in order to minimize the "spoiling" of the quantizer distribution.

Special thanks to Selur for providing the one response that was actually helpful.

__________________
If I ask "How do I do X?" or "what happens if I do X?", and X is a very bad thing that no one would ever normally do, assume that I already know this, and that I have Katie reasons for asking anyway.